Logoburroo and other place names

If an Australian visitor to the UK asked you for directions to somewhere they called Logoburroo [lɔgɜʉbəˈrʊː] would you know what place they were referring to?

A friend of mine heard an Australian pronouncing Loughborough, a town in Leicestershire in central England, in this way and thought it was an interesting attempt at the name. The usual pronunciation is [ˈlʌfbərə] (luff-buh-ruh) or [ˈlʌfbrə] (luff-bruh).

Loughborough features in the Doomsday Book of 1086 as ‘Lucteburne’, which possibly comes from the name Lehedeburh, “the town of Lehede” (named after someone called Lehede) [source].

Borough, burgh, brough and bury, which all come from the Old English burg, are common elements in English place names, e.g. Loughborough, Canterbury and Middlesbrough; and are also found in Scottish place names as burch and burgh, e.g. Edinburgh and Jedburgh. Related words are also found in Dutch (burcht, burg, borg – castle, borough), French (bourg – market townn), German (burg – castle, fortifcation), and the Scandinavian languages (borg – castle, city).

The Proto-Indo-European root *bʰerǵʰ- (hill) is also the root of the Proto-Celtic word *brixs (hill), from which we get the Brythonic word *brigā, which is part of the name Brigantī, the Celtic tribe that occupied a large part of northern Britain at the time of the Roman invasion (43 AD). The element briga also appears in Gaulish place names; and from the same root is bre, an obsolete word for hill in Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Scottish Gaelic (also bré/brí in Irish).

Hill is usually bryn in Welsh, cnoc in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and torgenn in Breton; and the elements brae/bray/bre appear in some English, Irish and Scottish place names.

“-/ʃɪə/ rather than -/ʃə/ (or even -/ˈʃaɪə/). for “shire” seems to be a real East Midlands thing.”

I don’t think I’ve heard -/ˈʃaɪə/ from an English person (except when affecting an older form of speech, in folk songs etc.). But the -/aɪ/- pronunciation seems to be the standard in Scotland – /ˈros ʃaɪᵊr/ /ˈperθ ʃaɪᵊr/ /’lan ərk ʃaɪᵊr/ etc.

Lev – according to Wiktionary, برج (burj) is a “borrowing from Classical Syriac ܒܘܪܓܐ (burgāʾ), from Ancient Greek πύργος (purgos) which may be an ancient borrowing from Proto-Germanic *burgz, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerǵʰ-.”

Sounds very like the story of the American, a fellow who had studied English place names, who stopped to ask directions to the town from where his ancestors originated. He called out through the open window to a Yorkshireman what sounded like “Where’s Canary’s Burg?”.